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Things have changed since the Heroic Age. Antarctic research bases are now snugly insulated, and re-provisioned by plane. Skidoos have replaced man-hauled sledges. Sleeping bags are of goose-down. Fatalities are rare. But of course the winds still blow, the winters are still lightless, Antarctic science remains an arduous pursuit and Antarctic scientists are a necessarily hardy and passionate tribe. Among them is Chris Turney, an Australian and British geologist and climatologist, who has now written a partly excellent book about the birth of polar science 100 years ago.
The Terra Nova centenary has already seen a blizzard of new Scott-ish books, to add to the vast existing bibliography of Antarctic literature. And for the first half of 1912 it is hard to work out what Turney has to say that is new about this under-inhabited and over-described continent. Chapters are devoted to the early history of southern exploration, the Shackleton expedition of 1907-09, the Terra Nova expedition of 1910-13, and Amundsen’s audacious stealing of the Pole from under Scott’s nose.
These re-tellings are familiar, but cheerily done. I was reminded of what a fine stylist Shackleton could be, as when he describes sailing into a fleet of tabular icebergs: ‘A stillness, weird and uncanny, seemed to have fallen upon everything when we entered the silent water streets of this vast unpeopled white city.’ Reminded, too, of the tonal mixture of Pooter, Buster Keaton and Beckett that characterises many expedition journals of this period. ‘During most of the day the Prof has been walking on his ankles,’ wrote Mawson in 1908 of a companion whose boots had frozen to his feet. ‘He was no doubt doing his best this way, and Mac appears to have kicked him several times when in the harness.’
Turney’s book only breaks fresh ground in those chapters when he concentrates on science. There is a terrific short section on George ‘Sunny Jim’ Simpson, a dour scientist on the Terra Nova expedition who established a ‘first-class meteorological station’ (Scott’s phrase) at Cape Evans, and who ‘took Antarctic meteorology into the 20th century’. While the Terra Nova expedition failed to bag the Pole, its scientific yield was huge: ‘some 80 official scientific reports’, the publication of ‘eight volumes on zoology, along with others on the aurora, botany, cartography, geology, glaciology, gravity and magnetism’; the collection of ‘more than 2,000 different species of plants and animals’, 400 of them ‘completely new to science’.
The second half of 1912 is consistently fascinating. A chapter called ‘The Dash Patrol’ narrates the ‘almost forgotten’ Japanese expedition of 1910-12, which turned into an epic of inexperience, political complication and near-success against the odds. Before leaving Japan, the members of the expedition swore fealty on a scroll, ‘on which the vow of [our] intent was sealed with our own blood’. When their ship was attacked by a pod of 20 killer whales, the two dog-drivers ‘declared the whales messengers of the gods, and were soon lost in fervent prayers during the attack’. At one point a young crew member ‘dived half-naked into the sea to fight a wounded seal in the freezing water’. Although they were mercilessly murderous towards any fauna they encountered — drowning albatrosses in barrels, battering penguins to death with sticks — the Japanese were (like Scott) sentimental about their dogs. When they had to abandon 20 of them ‘the loss was felt deeply’, and the dogs were remembered in the daily prayers of the expedition leader for the rest of his life.
Near the end of his book, Turney considers the famous rock samples found on the sledges which Scott, Wilson, Oates and Bowers hauled back during their fatal return march from the Pole. The samples — weighing 16 kg in total — had been collected from the moraines of the Beardmore glacier. Even as their pace slowed and their bodies fell apart, the men continued to carry the rocks; committed to an ideal of science that far exceeded common sense or self-interest.
Turney’s achievement in 1912 is to explain how such an ideal emerged, and why Scott and his men were willing to become martyrs to geology.
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